


It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards

by isaac richard (isaacrichard)



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Season/Series 02, Slow Burn, certifiable sad person tyrell wellick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:21:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25532764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaacrichard/pseuds/isaac%20richard
Summary: Irving attempts to show Tyrell a little humanity. He finds it's not completely in vain.
Relationships: Elliot Alderson/Tyrell Wellick, Irving/Tyrell Wellick
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards

**Author's Note:**

> god s3 is like..... they fucked in that cabin, bro.  
> enjoy <33

_But I hear it inside my head all day_   
_When I realize I'm just holding on to_   
_The hope, that maybe_   
_Your feelings don't show_

_It feels like I only go backwards, baby_   
_Every part of me says: Go ahead_   
_Then I got my hopes up again, oh no... not again..._

_-_ Tame Impala, Feels Like We Only Go Backwards

* * *

Tyrell can’t get a read on Irving.

Not true read, anyway. His cover story – wife, kids, novel, Big Brother – was almost certainly horseshit. How could he sit around, puppyguard Tyrell for Dark Army like he was supposed to, if he had a wife to rush home to? The fact that he didn’t offer up a last name even put the alias “Irving” into question.

Tyrell was stuck in a cabin with a guy he knew nothing for sure about, only that he worked for the organization that could kill Tyrell, and his family, and _Elliot –_ at a drop of a hat.

So, yeah. Scared shitless didn’t come close to how he was feeling.

“Are you alright?” Irving sounds a little startled, uncomfortable – thick Bronx accent pitching a notch – but his eyes are soft. It’s only then Tyrell realizes that he’s crying, and probably has been crying since they were dumped at the cabin, watching the DA van peel out, head back to civilization.

“What the fuck do you think?” Tyrell hisses, sopping up his face with his suit jacket sleeve.

“Ah, fair enough,” Irving murmurs. Tyrell finds himself rethinking how untrue Irving’s fatherly status was. He was speaking softly, as if not to frighten, and didn’t seem to realize he was doing it. Instinct.

“If it makes you feel any better, you’d be dead by now if they couldn’t use you. You’re a valuable player in this – this, here, this is just a hiccup. We’ll have you back in your penthouse in two shakes, huh?”

Tyrell hangs his head like a scolded child, sniffling. His whole body is flush with embarrassment, but he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t ask. “Where is Elliot?”

Irving shakes his head, though it seems as though he regrets having to. “Can’t tell you that one, buddy, you know I can’t. Wish I could.” Irving shakes his head again.

“You seem like you don’t like DA very much,” Tyrell notes. “You ever try the Classifieds?”

Irving rolls his eyes. “Har-de-har. I have respect for my work.”

“For killing people?”

Irving just smiles, cold. Tyrell catches his own reflection in the polished lenses of Irving's glasses. They distort him.

“I could ask you just the same, Mr. Wellick.”

“I’m not doing this,” Tyrell says, belligerent, staring daggers into the laptop in his hands like it was God’s affront to the world.

“You steal me away from my family, dump me in the middle of nowhere, and my task is to hack for you? Forget it. You can kill me, first.”

Irving laughs, calmly turns away. “You’ll do it.”

Tyrell lasts three days.

The laptop is the only device in the cabin with internet access, and besides Googling his own name – _okay, ouch –_ he becomes quickly absorbed in his task.

He knows it’s good work, even if he’s not full-assing it. He was no Elliot Alderson, but he was a more proficient hacker than most, and had never let himself get rusty.

“Ah, there he is. You’re doing great work, Tyrell. My bosses are pleased,” Irving says, with a note of pride.

Tyrell hums, from where he’s buried under a mountain of code and commands. “Yes,” he says, flatly.

He raises his head from the laptop for the first time in hours – days? – and looks into Irving’s pitying expression. Unlike most of the DA goons Tyrell had had the misfortune of interacting with, Irving didn’t bother to school his face, hide what he was feeling.

Tyrell didn’t know whether to feel respect, or disgust.

_God, he’s going to give me some speech on taking care of myself, isn’t he?_

“However, while your work is great, you are…” Irving gestures with a hand, to Tyrell’s unkempt state. He hadn’t showered since before arriving – call it a protest, or a depression, or what have you. He had stopped giving a shit. “Not.”

“Fuck off,” Tyrell says, no heat in it. “You can be my keeper, but you’re not my father.”

Irving seems a little confused by that reaction, his eyebrows knitting together over the golden rim of his glasses – glasses that haven’t been in style since 1984. “I just want what’s best for you, Tyrell.”

Tyrell should have thrown his head back and laughed. Him? _Irving,_ Dark Army ringleader, at least to a small degree? Someone who could destroy everything Tyrell had in life, easily, wanted the best for him?

It sounded like a practical joke, and Tyrell thinks, vaguely, that he should treat it like one. He should take no significance in Irving’s words, because he knew they meant nothing. He was parroting what he was told to say, or else made it up himself.

“Not because I’m supposed to,” Irving goes on. “I’ve kept hundreds of assholes for DA, and I cared about very few of them. But you?”

Irving smiles, rueful. “You’re me, kid. A me from twenty years ago, maybe – how old are you, anyway?”

“Thirty-three,” Tyrell murmurs, looking everywhere but into those damned glasses.

He didn't want to see how much truth there was in Irving's eyes. It was either going to be too much, or nowhere near enough.

“More like fifteen years ago, then, but anyway – I been through it, believe you me. And you got the baby? Shit. _Not_ easy. It was a tough hand you were dealt, Tyrell. None of us are innocent, anymore, but… Y’know. Don’t give up. Take a fucking shower.”

Tyrell showers until the water runs cold, his hair in his eyes, his eyes shut. The cheap ivory soap – the kind of bar soap Tyrell hadn’t used in ten years or more – reminds him of childhood, of thin suds scrubbed over washcloths, and in turn scrubbed onto him.

The whole cabin experience had been a blast from the past, to Tyrell’s – not dismay, but he wasn’t a fan of it, either. More than once, he had opened his eyes thinking it was 1995.

In the mornings, when his surroundings were faded into shadows and all he could see was the wood-paneled walls, same as it looked in his farmhouse childhood bedroom. Then, the shadowed DA laptop almost looked like his first computer: a Commodore 64, outdated by the time he had the money for it, and costing him a fortune in allowances.

It had been a bulky thing, ugly and prehistoric-looking, and he had loved it until it died on him, in early 2001.

Tyrell smiles a little to himself at the memory. What would his teenage-self think of him now? On the one hand, he had done more than okay. On the other, he was, currently, trapped against his will. It was a tossup, as he had known adulthood to often be.

The water’s freezing by that point, to the point of discomfort, but the shower is private and dim, and Tyrell hadn’t felt truly alone since arriving at the cabin. Not that Irving was up his ass – he wasn’t, and would actually leave for days at a time – but that Tyrell knew, even when he was physically alone, someone had eyes on him.

It was why he hadn’t attempted escape: it was pointless, and would end in nothing but pain for him. He was doomed to sit pretty until they were done with him: killed him or let him go.

At that thought, he begins to weep, unbidden. Quiet, but unbidden, shower-water and tears mixing on his face, indistinguishable. He cries until he can no longer stand the cold shower, shuts off the faucet, and cries some more, naked in the shower.

“Tyrell?” Irving’s voice behind the door scares the shit out of Tyrell, and he nearly slips. He makes a strangled little noise, feeling off-kilter and dizzy.

“Are you okay?”

No. No, he wasn’t fucking _okay_. “Go away,” he mutters, so low he knows Irving can’t hear him.

Elliot had once told him – and the thoughts of Elliot come every day, no matter how hard Tyrell tries to keep them from his mind – that his loneliness was like a disease. That it sickened him, hollowed him out. Tyrell could feel what he meant, in the concave center of his chest, and feels like a liar for what he had told Elliot after that revelation.

_“You won’t have to be alone again. This is fate, Elliot. This proves it.”_

Now they were both alone again, at least to Tyrell’s understanding. At least, he was alone, and Elliot still had his loneliness – wherever the hell he was, Tyrell was sure Elliot still felt alone.

Tyrell feels like a sham, a fraud, a boy in big man’s clothing. He hadn’t even been able to be there for Elliot. Or Joanna, or himself. He weeps.

“Tyrell – shit, please answer me. Are you having a breakdown in there? Don’t do anything stupid.”

Maybe he was. Tyrell doesn’t answer, and then he’s looking at Irving’s bemused expression, eyebrows grazing his pushed-back hairline, through the semi-transparent shower curtain. He continues to cry.

“Oh –“

Irving must have been out of his depth, Tyrell guesses. He can’t say he really cares. He just expects the guy to turn on his heel and leave, maybe even be gone for a few days while Tyrell gets his shit together, started acting like the grown adult he supposedly was.

Maybe it was just the lack of a façade – no Joanna, no E Corp, to cover up his broken personhood.

But what did that mean for the rest of it? When he was returned to that corporate world, where he was a married, upstanding-ish citizen? Who would he be at the end of this?

“Oh, kitten, that’s alright,” Irving is saying, and Tyrell is too far gone to take much note of the impromptu nickname.

“You got a towel? Yeah, okay, here…”

Tyrell wraps the towel around his waist, barely feeling himself move, and steps out of the shower. Autopilot carries him through it.

And then he’s facing Irving, barely dressed, and still weeping, somehow.

“Not the tough guy you’ve made yourself out to be, huh?” Irving says, mildly. “That’s okay. At least you haven’t lost your humanity.”

Tyrell sniffles, looks away, rubbing his middle finger against his thumb. He needed to cut his nails – funny what you take for granted, when you can do whatever you want. 

“Is that the only upside?” he says, wetly.

To his surprise, Irving laughs. “Is the only upside to pain and suffering keeping your humanity? Maybe. I couldn’t tell you for sure. I never saw any kind of upside; when it was me.”

“You keep saying that,” Tyrell mutters. “Who were you, then? When it was you?”

Irving’s smile drops. “Not someone you would have wanted to know. Someone who deserved the shit cards they were handed.”

Tyrell hums noncommittally. “And your family, they know of this?”

Irving narrows his eyes, and his voice drops to dangerously low place. “What the hell are you getting at, Swede?”

“Nothing,” Tyrell says, honestly, because he really wasn’t digging for information. “I don’t know you, is all.”

“You shouldn’t,” Irving says primly, and turns to leave.

Tyrell rips through his bedroom like a tornado, throwing things off the wall and topping over anything not nailed down. He doesn’t know why. The anger comes quickly, burns out rapidly, leaving him heaving in a destroyed room. Only the laptop and the bed go unharmed.

The bed, which he crawls into, exhausted. He sleeps dreamlessly, still nude.

“You sure did a number in here,” Irving’s voice in the corner of the room. Tyrell startles, sits up – it was early evening, if the light outside was any indication.

“How long was I out?” he murmurs.

“Couple hours,” Irving says, and steps out of the shadows. “Why’d you tear up in here? What made you so mad?”

Tyrell hangs his head, chastised. “Dunno.”

“Hm, well,” Irving says, looking around the destroyed room. “Careful of the glass when you get up, then.”

Tyrell pushes himself so his back is against the bedframe, his blanketed knees to his chest. “What do you care?”

“I don’t want you to cut your feet up? Who would wish that on anybody?”

“No – I mean – you know what I mean,” Tyrell says, holding in his mounting frustration. “You care, but you don’t care, because you’re Dark Army. You can’t care. It’s not in your job description.”

“I’m just me, Tyrell. I work for them, but they don’t control me. Free will, and all that? Huh? Anything I’ve done, other than confirm you’re not dead in a ditch, has been of my own volition. Like I said – I ain’t cared about any fool they’ve made me babysit in ten years or more. Just you.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that?”

Irving shrugs. “You can, if you want to. It’s the truth.”

“It’s pity.”

“Call it what you want, Tyrell. Deny me three times and give me the ego-boost, if you want.” Irving grins at his own shitty joke. “But I wouldn’t yank your chain. Not like this.”

“I’ve done this dance before, you know?” Irving goes on, creeping closer on slow feet. His shoes crunch over the glass, over what used to be a pretty beautiful framed landscape. “And she was there for me. I figure, pay it forward, huh?”

“Who’s ‘she’?” Tyrell murmurs.

Irving smiles, wordlessly sits on the corner of Tyrell’s bed. “I wish I could make this easier for you.”

“I’ve never been very good at _easy.”_

“Ha!” Irving laughs, slapping Tyrell’s thigh. “That was one fact about you I didn’t need to be told.”

Irving’s hand is warm, solid. His big brown eyes are kind – no malice, despite Tyrell’s destruction. The pity remains, which Tyrell doesn’t appreciate, but the concavity in his chest doesn’t care.

_“Loneliness is a disease,” Elliot had said, breath hot on Tyrell’s neck. Enshrouded by neon. “And the cure isn’t always where you would expect it to be, I guess.”_

“ _Oh_.” It isn’t graceful, not by a long shot, and it’s some kind of comedic timing listening to Irving’s shoes drop to the floor.

“Don’t you have a wife?” Tyrell’s breath is short, rapid, in his throat rather than his lungs. He remembers, belatedly, that he’s completely naked under the – suddenly thin – covers.

Irving licks his lips, two inches from Tyrell’s mouth. He smells like cheap cologne, and like a leather car interior. “Don’t you?”

Tyrell whines, unceremoniously hooks his leg around Irving’s upper thighs, as best he can. He loses himself in Irving, in the moment their lips meet – because at least that’s warm, real, human.

 _I'm not alone, this way,_ he thinks. His legs fall open, and the covers fall away. _At least for a little while._


End file.
